and here is president obama. >> good morning, everybody. please have a seat. welcome to the white house. as i said in my state of the union address last week, our top priority must be to do everything we can to grow the economy and create good middle class jobs. that's our top priority. that's our north star. that drives every decision we make. it has to drive every decision that congress and everybody in washington makes over the next several years. and that's why it's so troubling that just ten days from now congress might allow a series of automatic, severe budget cuts to take place that will do the exact opposite. it won't help the economy, it won't create jobs, will visit hardship on a whole lot of people. here is what is at stake. over the last few years both parties have worked together to reduce our deficits by more than $2.5 trillion. more than two third of that was through some pretty tough spending cuts. the rest of it was through raising taxes, tax rates on the wealthist 1% of americans. and together when you take the spending cuts, and the increas